Study On The Adjectives In Lun Heng

The study on the vocabularies of a book or about a special subject is the basic project of the researches in Chinese vocabulary history. This paper tends to describe and explain the adjectives in Lun Heng in details.The paper consists of five chapters. Chapter One introduces the current studies on the vocabularies of Lun Heng and ancient Chinese books, the main introductions and the different editions of Lun Heng. In Chapter Two, the author defines the standand of class-word and adjective, making a statistic of the total amount of adjectives in Lun Heng and dividing them into two categories: quality and state adjectives on which this chapter gives a detailed research and comparison of their grammar functions. Chapter Three deals with the meaning of synonym, all the synonyms among adjectives in Lun Heng and the analysis of the common sememes of the synonyms. Chapter Four explains antonyms. In Chapter Five the present autor makes a study of the phenomenon of word-class shift, by dividing them into two categories: the shift of adjective to verb and the shift of adjective to noun with a complete statistic and analysis of them. Finally the word-class shift functions of the quality and state adjectives are compared and described.